Article August 14, 1909 Issue

In referring to Christian Science as "Mrs. Eddy's doctrine...

Howard C. Van Meter

Portland (Ore.) Labor Press.

In referring to Christian Science as "Mrs. Eddy's doctrine that evil does not exist," and "Mrs. Eddy assures them that their sins do not exist," the conclusion being that such teaching permits an individual to act evilly and not recognize the responsibility of it, you fail to comprehend its true meaning. If such were the case, your criticism would be legitimate; but it is not. The design of Mrs. Eddy's writings is to help humanity in overcoming evil and its effects, sin, disease, and death, and at the outset attention is called to the fact that the admission of their reality, through a wrong sense of what reality is, handicaps the effort to overcome them. So it is declared that reality properly applies to that which expresses the nature of an unchangeable God, who is good, and that unreality applies to that which is contrary thereto.

Evil is not good and cannot be good, and the classification of it and its effects as unreal does not in any sense license its indulgence, but is rather an encouragement toward its destruction. On page 339 of the text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," is the following: "A sinner can receive no encouragement from the fact that Science demonstrates the unreality of evil, for the sinner would make a reality of sin,—would make that real which is unreal, and thus heap up 'wrath against the day of wrath.'"

All should appreciate that error of any kind must be a mistaken sense of something that is true, and when the truth is recognized that which had seemed to be real as error will naturally disappear, and this recognition can come only as the individual works from the standpoint of one supreme infinite God, as the sole cause and creator of all reality.

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